home + garden

We Minnesotans love our boats. We lead the nation in per capita boat ownership, and in summer, lots of us like to say we "live on the water."

But only a few love their boats enough to really live on them -- year-round, even in coldest winter, sometimes under shrink-wrapping to keep out the elements. Steve Cherveny's houseboat, the River Empress, has been shrouded in plastic since late October.

"It's like living in a beachball," said the St. Paul bartender, one of about two dozen "live-aboards" who make their home at the Harriet Island marina, across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Paul.

The wrap clouds his view of the skyline, but it keeps his decks snow-free, which doubles his winter 350-square-foot living space, he said.

Space isn't a concern for his neighbors Barbara Haake and Truman Howell, who live year-round on their massive houseboat, the Trubador. With multiple rooms on two stories, they can dwell very comfortably without the use of their three decks in winter.

But they, like all the live-aboards, deal with the other downsides of year-round boat living, including long, cold walks between the car and the dock, lugging in groceries and lugging out garbage. Occasionally the water supply freezes, although the river itself does so only rarely.

Despite these hassles, Haake loves winter on the river, she said. "There's a peacefulness about it." A self-employed businesswoman, she also owns a house in Moundsview, which she uses during the workday, but she prefers to spend her personal time on the boat. "It's absolutely an ideal place," she said. "I've always been a water person. I can't imagine living on a dry lot."

Manor of the marina

From the outside, the Trubador looks unmistakably like a boat -- a really big boat-- 70 tons of steel with a dock for a front walk. But inside its 1,800 square feet of living space, it's easy to forget that you're on the water. The rooms are spacious, the floors are gleaming hardwood, and the painted plaster walls are hung with framed artwork. There's little sense of movement; even on a windy day the panoramic view of downtown St. Paul shifts only slightly behind the French windows.

The interior looks and feels so much like a land-built home that one of Barbara Haake's grandchildren was skeptical when he came for a holiday gathering. " 'You said we'd have Christmas on a boat -- where's the boat?' " Haake recalled him saying.

The Trubador is "a real house," said Haake, a former state representative, and that's what she and her fiancé, architect Truman Howell, wanted when they had their boat built in 1994. At the time, Howell owned another houseboat that he docked year-round at Harriet Island. "It was a nice boat, but it was too small," Haake said. "I wanted closet space."

So they designed the Trubador ("Tru" for Truman, "ba" for Barbara, and "dor," an acronym for "dwelling on river") and commissioned a boat manufacturer in Michigan to build, from scratch, a 24- by 65-foot steel body with two 175-horsepower engines and three decks. Once the boat's structure was completed, Haake and Howell piloted it to Harriet Island, a three-week late-fall voyage on Lake Michigan, through Chicago and St. Louis, then up the Mississippi River to St. Paul. (At one spot near Chicago, the boat was too tall to clear a bridge, so they had to pump river water into its hull to lower it.)

Finishing the boat's interior took a lot longer -- about a decade, Haake said. "We did it as we got time and money." The project "scared a lot of contractors," she added. "On a boat, there's no such thing as a plumb line."

But the Trubador now has every comfort of home, including a master suite with jacuzzi tub, a fully equipped kitchen with a pantry, and a washer and dryer in the hull. (The 25 year-round slips that the St. Paul Yacht Club leases from the city are hooked up to city water, gas, electricity and sewer service. They even have cable.)

Haake loves the peaceful silence of winter on the water, as well as the lively bustle of the marina in summertime, when the boating population increases more than tenfold. "It's such a social place -- like a big dormitory," she said. Every Friday night in the summer, there's a potluck, as well as many impromptu gatherings. "Put a chair out, and before you know it, you've got a party," she said.

Luck and timing

Steve Cherveny considers himself a lucky guy to have one of the 25 live-aboard slips at Harriet Island. There's a waiting list now. But when Cherveny first moved there, shortly after buying his 47- by 16-foot fiberglass boat in late 1996, the location was less than ideal.

The island, now a regional park, was a "mud pit," Cherveny recalled. Workers were blowing up the nearby Wabasha Street bridge, and Cherveny, a bartender, would come home from work at 2:30 a.m., get to sleep around 5, only to be awakened two hours later by the roar of dynamite.